Case Number 07303

Clash By Night

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All Rise...

Judge Joe Armenio has officially given up trying to define film noir.

The Charge

"Livin' in my house! Lovin' another man! Is that what you call bein'
honest? That's just givin' it a nice name!"

Opening Statement

Clash by Night was directed by Fritz Lang in 1952, from a screenplay
by Alfred Hayes that was adapted from a play by Clifford Odets. Warner has
released it as part of its second film noir box set; the term has been
used so expansively—sometimes it seems that any film from classic
Hollywood with a gloomy atmosphere has been branded a noir—that it
hardly seems useful anymore. For what it's worth, Peter Bogdanovich says in his
commentary that he doesn't consider this film noir because there isn't
any crime in it. It's kind of a banal definition, but one that seems to jibe
well with the popular perception of noir as a genre involving private
dicks and femme fatales. Clash by Night could be better described as a
sort of fervent proletarian drama of ideas, filtered through Lang's fatalistic
sensibility. It's not a very successful film, despite Lang's characteristically
assured and expressive direction; the clash between Odets' and Lang's
preoccupations is never resolved in a coherent way, and the film's gender
politics are problematic to say the least.

Facts of the Case

The film is set among the fisherfolk of Monterey, California: Jerry D'Amato
(Paul Douglas, The Maggie), is a
decent, salt-of-the-earth type who lives with his alcoholic father (Silvio
Minciotti) and manipulative Uncle Vince (J. Carrol Naish). Mae Doyle (Barbara
Stanwyck, Double Indemnity) is
a local girl who escaped to the big city but has returned home after an unhappy
romance with a politician. She finds Jerry a bit dull but, lonely and desperate
for security, she agrees to marry him. Their marriage is challenged by Jerry's
worldly, cynical friend Earl (Robert Ryan, The Naked Spur), who insists
that he and Mae are in fact meant for each other. A subplot involves the
relationship between Mae's macho brother Joe (Keith Andes) and his girlfriend
Peggy (Marilyn Monroe, Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes).

The Evidence

Clash by Night begins with a long, virtually dialogue-free documentary
sequence showing the activities of Jerry's fishing boat. Much of the film was
made on location in northern California, a rarity for a Hollywood film of the
period (although by 1952 Italian neorealism had begun to influence some
Hollywood filmmakers, resulting in a brief vogue for location shooting). It's
rare for a Hollywood film to avoid plot and character for quite this long, and
it's a beautiful, atmospheric sequence, riveting in a way that the rest of the
film is not.

With its emphasis on the wildness of nature (there are plenty of shots
throughout the film of turbulent, crashing waves), this sequence also
illustrates some of the differences between Lang's worldview and that of the
screenplay. Odets and Hayes tend to see "nature" as orderly and
peaceful; Jerry, who is touch with the natural world, is both happier and more
moral than his friend Earl, who works as a film projectionist and hence deals
with the illusory and unnatural. Odets was always concerned with the transition
from traditional societies, in which people existed in a sort of organic accord
with their environments, to modern, capitalist ones, in which people were
rootless, lacking in interesting work, flailing wildly about in the search for
fulfillment. In one sequence, Jerry's father, who has been reduced to a drunken,
sentimental wreck by the decline of the world of his youth, chides Earl for his
laziness, saying, "I like work." "I don't like
work," Earl snarls back, establishing himself as the unsatisfied modern
drifter, degraded by the failure of the world to find a place for him.

Lang doesn't seem particularly interested in these themes; he's more
concerned with the tempestuous nature of the love triangle, the way it reveals
romance as combat. "Nature" for him is turbulent rather than peaceful,
chaotic rather than orderly. There's quite a disconnect between the screenplay's
suggestion that a connection to nature gives Jerry an admirable simplicity and
Lang's images of wildness, both human and natural; Lang is most interested in
the ways in which the fundamental violence of the world eludes our pathetic
attempts to tame it.

The movie's gender politics are (unfortunately, as it turns out) more
coherent. Mae is driven to Jerry out of a need for stability, a desire to be
taken care of, to give herself up to domesticity. Earl almost convinces her to
continue struggling for independence but, in the end, she realizes that a
woman's "natural" duty is to give herself up to her man, that
happiness lies in submission. These themes are played out even more explicitly
in the subplot involving Keith Andes' and Marilyn Monroe's characters; Joe is an
almost comic caricature of wooden machismo, and Peggy is briefly willful before
submitting to his commanding manliness, expressing her surprise that she likes a
man who pushes her around. Yikes.

This emotional story requires quite a bit of technique from the cast, among
which Douglas is the weak link. He does his best, although miscast; he's too
much of a sophisticate to be convincing as a humble Italian fisherman. Stanwyck
is typically excellent, suggesting the many levels of Mae's ambivalence. Watch
the scene just before she's seduced by Earl, when she breaks down in the
kitchen; she continues to pour coffee even as she cries, attempting until the
very last moment to maintain her facade of domestic competence. Ryan is fine as
well, richly evoking Earl's malice as well as his loneliness. Monroe fans will,
of course, be interested in this film for her presence. It was one of her first
straight dramatic roles, and she acquits herself respectably, although
Bogdanovich says in his commentary that Lang was endlessly frustrated with her
for flubbing her lines and ruining his characteristic long takes; there's one
scene early on in which her lines have obviously been dubbed in later.

The full-frame transfer preserves the original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The film
is in decent shape; there are some print defects, but nothing terribly
distracting. The mono sound, as well, is serviceable. The only extra of note is
Bogdanovich's commentary, which is best at conveying gossip such as the story
about Lang's frustration with Monroe related above. It's clear that he hasn't
prepared very much; at one point early on he admits that he doesn't remember how
the movie ends, and he seems unfamiliar with the Odets play on which it is
based. He talks a lot and rather blandly about the enduring nature of the
"love triangle" plot, avoiding any of the film's larger themes. He's
good at pointing out how particular shots illustrate Lang's technique, but he
runs out of things to say after a while, repeating his solid but unremarkable
assertion that Lang's visual expressiveness had its origins in his experience as
a silent filmmaker. As in his commentary on Lang's Fury, Bogdanovich occasionally plays
audio clips from his 1965 interviews with the director. There's less of this
material here than there is in Fury, perhaps five minutes' worth.

Closing Statement

Clash by Night is a minor Fritz Lang film; neither the love triangle
plot nor the screenplay's antimodernist politics seem to engage him very much.
It's kind of a mess, but with talents like Lang, Odets, Stanwyck, and Ryan
involved, it's at least an interesting mess.

The Verdict

Guilty of an attitude toward relationships that would seem silly if it wasn't
kind of repugnant.